Review: Miss O'Dell: My Hard Days and Long Nights with The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and the Women They Loved

Miss O'Dell: My Hard Days and Long Nights with The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and the Women They Loved by Chris O'Dell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this book immensely, apart from the fact that it was another story of an insider. Chris O’Dell was a trusted and loved assistant and tour manager to some of the biggest acts of the rock era like The Rolling Stones, CSN&Y & Queen. If you look on the back of the Stone’s Exile on Main Street, you’ll see her in the lower left corner; people know her as the ‘mystery lady’ here. It was also her luck to often be in the middle of the Beatles’ love squabbles between George & Pattie & Eric Clapton. George & Maureen Starkey & Ringo, a jealous Clapton & Pattie, not to mention an early, heart-breaking affair with Leon Russell. My personal favorite quotation from the book? “Clapton is God? Well Eric Clapton was no god to me. He was a royal pain in the ass”.

I need to regress for a moment. I like the imagery she uses of a trapdoor hidden in the floor when you as a drug user think you’ve hit rock bottom. And no, there’s another trapdoor under that one, and another…I sympathize with her struggle to beat drugs, and I’m glad she overcame her addiction, but I don’t see what was so enthralling about sticking a needle in your arm. It had to be the addiction talking. I’ve been ding that all my life, literally, sticking myself with needles to take my insulin, though that only involves a subcutaneous injection. I have always had to put up with doctors doing blood draws. I hate needles. Just the idea of sticking one in my veins makes me cringe. Forgive me for saying so…actually, don’t bother. I don’t see the attraction of shooting up. That’s one notch I’ll never need, thank you.

Where was I? Well, here’s a woman who can justly claim to have had four songs written about her. Here we go…Leon Russell penned two of them, “Pisces Apple Lady” and “Hummingbird” during their brief affair in 1969. I knew George Harrison’s song “Miss O’Dell” as the B-side of his hit “Give Me Love (Give Me Peace on Earth”. And then there’s Joni Mitchell’s “Coyote”, written on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder tour, when O’Dell was cheating with Sam Shepherd, after which he cheated on her with Joni Mitchell. Yeah. I had fun with this book. Dig in.

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